1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus, an image capturing method, and a computer-readable medium storing program. More particularly, the present invention relates to an image capturing apparatus with an electric flash for capturing a subject and correcting the captured image.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, when an image capturing apparatus, such as a digital camera captures a subject located at a long distance, image quality degradation, such as noise, blur or over/underexposure, tends to occur. A Japanese patent application publication No. 11-261797 discloses an image processing method for generating image data, which captures a single scene for multiple times with different focal length and superimposes the plurality of captured images so that the plurality of subjects, which are located at different distance, are captured in focus. Also, a Japanese patent application publication No. 11-261822 discloses an image processing method for reducing degradation of image quality, which is caused by lack of marginal illumination, by detecting density difference of each area of the acquired image, and performing density correction in accordance with the increasing/decreasing gradient of the density from a central area of the image to a marginal area of the image.
However, the image processing method disclosed in the Japanese patent application publication No. 11-261797 has a problem that it requires an expensive image capturing apparatus equipped with a multi-focus system. Moreover, the image processing method disclosed in the Japanese patent application publication No. 11-261822 corrects only the increasing/decreasing gradient of the density from the central area to the marginal area of the image, and the method is not capable of correcting degradation of the image that exists in the central area of the image.